Why C is The Default Drive in Windows? Here is Your Answer

A question that has bothered almost everyone of us at some point of time has been answered

Computers, which were thought as a luxury few years ago are now a necessity. Computers are making lives easier for almost everyone. Windows is a dominant OS used by majority of computer users. Actually it is used mostly in fields where computers have to be used for non technical tasks.(And hence those trolls on Facebook, describing how Linux wins).

There are many things which are usually ignored, And the question on naming of default drive in Windows is one of them.

It could be anything if it had to be C as it does not follow any order. Logically A should be the default drive.
Then why? why did Windows do this?
wonder1-2

Actually the reason is something historical. And it is related to the classic floppy drives . Before hard disks became standard(1980), floppy disks were used for booting the computers. These were available in two sizes at that time: 5 1/4 ” and 3 1/2?.

Those two floppy disk drives were labelled as Local Disk (A) and Local Disk (B). After the invention of Hard disk, floppy disk of size 8 inch came into existence.

The hard disk drive was named C. Once hard disks became standard and floppy disks became obsolete, the drive names A and B vanished.

As a result , drives other than default drive (C) labelled as D, E etc. DVD drive and USB drive are labelled as F, G and so on.

This is the answer of our question.

Despite of all this, you can rename your default it to whatever letter you want( if no other drive is present with same alphabet as its name) if you have administrative rights.

If you have one such question that you think has been ignored for a long time and should be searched for answers, you can post it here in the comments.

Abhishek Awasthi
Abhishek Awasthi
Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection -Mark Twain.

19 COMMENTS

  1. The 3.5″ drive wasn’t available until 1982 and even then wasn’t very popular. Before hard disk drives, the A drive was used to load programs and the B drive was used for storing the data that the program needed. Before that you would have to swap out your program disk for your data disk using the only drive you had, that being A.

    • Christopher Sholes, invented the type writer, originally he had the keys alphabetically but had issues with bars jamming when typing, so he tweaked this and created QWERTY, now there are different types of keyboard layouts but QWERTY is the most popular and the most compatible, look at your keyboard you should see those letters side by side, creating the word QWERTY, if not then you could be using a QWERTZ, AZERTY or a DVORAK layout, the QWERTY layout isn’t ergonomic, infact stenotypes are a lot more efficient than a QWERTY keyboards and a good stenographer can type 180 letters a minute, or 3 words every second, this is because they are stroking (typing) in syllables which allows them to type much faster than someone on a QWERTY layout.

      There is a huge downside to stenotypes, they’re harder to learn than a QWERTY, so even though they are in fact much faster for typing the learning curve is steep.

      All n all, I think another reason for why the keyboard specifically QWERTY was designed the way it is, and that’s for hand placement, this is my own personal opinion, but my hands rest within the center of the keyboard while typing and it (to me) feels more comfortable, then again because I grew up learning QWERTY my view on the matter is completely biased.

  2. In Windows, When free space in any drive is less than 10% it becomes of red color. Is it only an indicator or something else? is there any drawback of it?

  3. Why are there 8 bits in a byte? There could have been any number chosen as standard but why 8. My prof. asked this question but i couldn’t find the answer till now

  4. Those trolls know way better that you that this page along with 99% of serious business pages are served through linux servers, also flight, car and iot industry uses linux kernel to work. You better learn a bit more thatn windows so you’ll understand how file systems works so letter will be less important to you

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